China Digital Transit Cards: How to Get & Use Them in Every City (2026)

The gate that decides your morning

It’s 8:40am at a metro station in Chengdu. The platform is filling up, and there is a short line at the ticket machines where a couple of travelers are feeding in cash and squinting at a Chinese-language map. You walk past them, hold your phone over the gate, and you’re through before the machine has finished giving someone change.

That gap is the entire subject of this guide. China’s transit payment system moved fast in the last few years, and the old advice — buy a ¥20 card at the counter, load it with cash, queue to refund it at the end — still works but is no longer the default. There are now four realistic ways to ride: an Alipay or WeChat QR code, an Apple Wallet transit card, a physical smart card, and the paper ticket. Each has one job it does better than the others. This page sorts them out, city by city, with the deposit numbers and the fine print that actually trips people up.

Option 1: Alipay Transport QR code (the default for most travelers)

Alipay’s Transport feature is the path of least resistance. Open the app, tap Transport (出行) on the home screen, and it generates a QR code tied to the city you’re standing in. You scan it at the metro gate or hold it to the reader near the bus driver, and the fare comes off your linked payment method afterward.

The one thing that surprises people is that the code is per city. Beijing’s code is not Shanghai’s code is not Chengdu’s code. When you land somewhere new, Alipay prompts you to activate that city’s transit code, and you accept. It takes a few seconds and costs nothing, but it does have to happen for each stop on a multi-city trip. Foreign visitors can register with an overseas phone number and complete identity verification to switch the transit code on, which is the same setup you would do to pay for anything else in the app.

A few practical notes from how this actually behaves:

• Coverage spans metro and bus in most cities, and in some places (Shanghai and Hangzhou, for instance) the ferry as well. Taxis and DiDi are separate — those live elsewhere in the app.
• The weak spot is connectivity. The code needs a data connection to refresh. If your signal dies at the gate, the code can stall. This is the single real argument for carrying an Apple Wallet card or a physical card as backup, because both tap through with no connection at all.
• Bus is generally easier than metro for newer foreign accounts. A few travelers report the bus code activating cleanly while the metro code asks for more verification in certain cities. If the metro code resists, the bus code is the fallback, and the metro ticket machine is right there anyway.

Option 2: Apple Wallet transit card (best for iPhone users)

If you carry an iPhone, this is the cleanest option. Apple Wallet holds real transit cards for several Chinese cities — the Beijing Yikatong, the Shanghai Public Transportation Card, Guangzhou’s Yangchengtong, and Shenzhen Tong among them. You add the card once, load it with money, and then tap the gate exactly as you would with plastic. No QR code, no app to open, and no internet at the gate.

The feature that matters is Express Transit. The first card you add is set to Express mode automatically, which means you hold the phone (or Apple Watch) to the reader and it pays without Face ID, Touch ID, or even a fully charged screen in the low-power window. For a subway system where your hands are full and your battery is anxious, that is worth more than it sounds. Apple Pay Express Transit now reaches across a large share of the country — one industry count puts it at 275 cities.

Setup is short:

1. Open Apple Wallet and tap +, then Transit Card.
2. Search for the city (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen).
3. Add the card and load funds. A refundable deposit of around ¥20 applies when you add cards such as the Shanghai or China T-Union card.
4. Top up through Apple Pay. Note that topping up these cards typically routes through China UnionPay, which is worth confirming against your linked card before you fly.

The reason a Beijing or Shanghai card matters beyond its home city is the T-Union standard, covered next. Beijing’s Yikatong was upgraded for iPhone users in 2025 and is described as usable in more than 300 cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Add one T-Union card to your Wallet and it effectively becomes a national transit card.

If you’re on Android: Google Wallet does not carry Chinese transit cards. Use the Alipay QR code instead. Samsung Pay and Huawei Pay do support Chinese transit cards on their own platforms if that’s what you carry.

The glue that holds it together: China T-Union (交通联合)

T-Union is the national interoperability standard, and it’s the reason “one card, whole country” is now literally true. Look for the 交通联合 mark on a card — physical or digital — and that card rides buses, metros, trams, and ferries across most of China rather than just the city that issued it.

The numbers are large. T-Union interoperability covers 336 prefecture-level and above cities as of late 2024, and the count keeps creeping up. Nearly every urban rail system on the mainland accepts it. Two boundaries are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It does not work on China Railway. High-speed and intercity trains are a separate ticketing system (the 12306 platform), and a T-Union card will not get you through a train-station gate. You still book those rides by name and seat.
• It now crosses into Hong Kong. From March 22, 2025, Hong Kong’s MTR began accepting China T-Union cards, and Guangzhou’s Yangchengtong is among those that work there. Shanghai and Hong Kong also linked their transit payment systems in early 2025. A mainland T-Union card in your Wallet can therefore carry you onto the MTR, which was not true a couple of years ago.

When you buy or add any card, check for the 交通联合 logo. With it, the card is national. Without it, it’s a single-city card that happens to look identical.

Option 3: Physical transit card (still cheap, still reliable)

The plastic card hasn’t gone away, and for some travelers it’s the right call. You buy one at a metro station service counter:

• ¥20 deposit, refundable.
• Load somewhere between ¥50 and ¥200.
• Tap at the gates and on the bus readers.
• Refund the deposit and any leftover balance at the end — but only at designated counters, usually major interchange and airport stations.

Ask for 退卡 (tuì kǎ) when you want your money back. You’ll get the deposit and remaining balance returned, sometimes minus a small handling fee. The catch that bites people: refunds are handled only in the issuing city. A Shanghai Public Transportation Card refunds in Shanghai, not in Beijing, so don’t buy a card in your last city and expect to cash it out at the airport there.

The physical card’s real strengths are its independence from your phone and its zero connectivity requirement. Battery dead, app glitching, data plan expired — the plastic still taps. Buy a T-Union-marked card and it works in those same 336 cities. For a stay of two weeks or more, or for a traveler who would rather not depend on a phone at every gate, this is the honest choice.

Guangzhou’s Yangchengtong is a good example of how the cards layer: a ¥20 refundable deposit, coverage across buses, metro, and water buses, and interoperability with the wider Lingnan Pass network across roughly 21 cities in Guangdong province on top of the national T-Union reach.

Option 4: WeChat Pay Transport (乘车码)

WeChat runs its own transit QR through a mini-program called 乘车码 (chéng chē mǎ, “ride code”). You find it by searching 乘车码 inside WeChat or through Pay & Services, pick your city, activate it, and scan exactly as with Alipay. It’s available across many major cities — Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Wuhan are all on the list.

The honest caveat: WeChat’s transit code tends to be less forgiving for foreign accounts than Alipay’s, and availability of the mini-program varies more from city to city. If WeChat Pay is already your primary payment method in China, the ride code is the natural extension and works fine. If you’re setting up from scratch purely to ride the metro, Alipay is the smoother on-ramp.

Paper tickets and single-journey tokens (the fallback)

Every metro system still sells a single-journey ticket or token at a machine or counter, for cash. It costs the fare and nothing more, with no deposit and no setup. You will use this roughly never if your phone works, but it’s the safety net that makes every other option low-risk: if the QR won’t activate and the Wallet card declines, you buy a token and ride anyway. The machines increasingly take mobile payment too, though cash is still accepted.

Which option fits your trip

Tourist day passes: do the math first

Day passes exist, and they’re usually not worth it for a short stay — but the arithmetic is quick.

• Shanghai: a 1-day metro pass runs ¥18 and a 3-day pass ¥45, both for unlimited metro rides from first use, and both exclude the Maglev. A Maglev-plus-metro combination ticket is ¥55 one way or ¥85 round trip from Pudong Airport.
• Beijing: comparable 1-day (about ¥20) and 3-day (about ¥50) passes exist, with the same logic.
• Other cities: availability varies; ask at the station service counter.

The break-even is roughly five metro rides in a day. Most sightseeing days produce three or four. Unless you’re crisscrossing the city on purpose, pay as you go — by QR, Wallet, or card — and you’ll spend less than the pass price.

The recommendation

For a trip of a few days on an iPhone, add a Beijing or Shanghai T-Union card to Apple Wallet before you leave and load it with enough for the week. It taps through offline, and the T-Union mark means it follows you to almost any other city on the itinerary. If you’re on Android, or you’d rather not commit money upfront, activate the Alipay Transport code when you land — it costs nothing to switch on and covers metro and bus almost everywhere.

The belt-and-braces setup is both at once: Alipay QR as the everyday tool, an Apple Wallet card as the offline backup that never needs a signal. Between the two, you will not get stuck at a gate. Skip the physical card unless you’re staying for weeks or you specifically want something that works when your phone is dead.

Frequently asked questions

Transit QR and card support vary by city and change; confirm for your destination at the official transport pages above (last verified 2026-07-24).